A black hole tore a star apart and sent a ghost particle ⚡ экспресс

Original: "Dust-obscured radio-emitting tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino event"

· Tianyao Zhou, Xinwen Shu, Guobin Mou, Lei Yang, Luming Sun, Fangkun Peng, Fabao Zhang, Hucheng Ding, Ning Jiang, Tinggui Wang, Yogesh Chandola, Daizhong Liu, Liming Dou, Yibo Wang, Jianguo Wang, Zhongzu Wu, Chenwei Yang

arXiv:2601.05601v1 · 2026-01-09 · CC BY 4.0 · ⏱ 1 min · High Energy

Astronomers have for the first time linked a mysterious high-energy neutrino to the moment a black hole ripped a star apart.

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Cosmic neutrinos are ghost particles, passing freely through the Earth. The IceCube telescope in the ice of Antarctica once caught such a neutrino, and it matched an infrared flare. That flare turned out to be the moment a black hole tore a star apart in a distant galaxy. Astronomers call this process spaghettification: the star gets stretched into a thin thread by uneven gravity.

Events like this happen in a single galaxy about once every 10,000 years. We were lucky to catch one.

During the disruption, some of the material is ejected outward, slamming into clouds of cosmic dust and gas. These collisions spawn particles of monstrous energy, including neutrinos. Radio telescopes confirmed: at the site of the catastrophe, a shock wave several light-years across is still raging.

If such coincidences recur, we'll understand how black holes act as natural accelerators, boosting matter to unimaginable speeds.

🎯 The name "spaghettification" came about because the difference in gravitational pull near a black hole stretches any object into a long thread — just like a strand of spaghetti.

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A black hole tore a star apart and sent a ghost particle ⚡ экспресс